The Great Hymn to the Aten - A New Translation, with Commentary
By the Marquis
Preface
I have little doubt that the basic facts of the life of Akhenaten will be at least somewhat familiar to the audience of J’accuse, so I will keep my expository remarks relatively brief. Akhenaten (née Amenhotep IV) ruled as Pharaoh of Egypt from roughly 1353–1336 BC. He is best known for a short-lived program of state-sponsored anticlericalism, attempting to centre the Egyptian religion around the exclusive veneration of the Sun, defacing the shrines of the rival gods and instantiating the Pharaoh, rather than the old tenured priesthood, as its sole intermediary with mankind. The Great Hymn translated below is the longest of the psalms uncovered from the tomb inscriptions at his royal city, Akhetaten.
The Great Hymn to the Aten - Translation
Rise in beauty from your holy divan,1
O Living Aten, Font of Life.
Surging over the horizon,
Your goodness has filled the Cosmos.
Bright-of-face, lordly, glittering above all things.
Your arrows strike the bounds of all you have made:
You have pursued Creation to the ends of the earth,
And delivered it in chains to your beloved Son.
You are far off, and yet your light stoops to reach us.
The people turn to trace your movements,
And feel you on their faces.2
When you retire unto the West,
the land is under the shadow of death -
The sleepers hide in their chambers, heads in their hands;
No eye makes out a companion.
Whatever they own is up for the taking -
if it were swiped from under their noses, they would not know it.
A lion hastens at every den. Every adder bites.
Darkness closes in, silence o’er the Earth - its Maker adjourns; until-
Ah, the first light!3
Spilling over the Horizon, the sun-disk shining in its day!
You banish the darkness, send forth your rays, and set the Two Lands dancing!
Raise up their bodies, swaddled and pure,
Limbs outstretched for love of the Dawn.
Then the Earth begins its work.
All herds graze in the pastures,
All grasses and flowers, budding sun-dappled and green4;
Birds take flight from their nests,
And lift their wings in prayer to your Soul;
Every cloven hoof takes up a dance,
Dancing the life that you pour out for them.
The fleets alike sail north and south,
Your Dawn opens every highway.
Fish leap from the river to see Your face,
As your light cracks the Deep.5
O, you who tended to us in the wombs of our mothers,
Who raises mankind from the seed,
Who cleaves the son to the placenta, gives him Life,
Who soothes him and dries his tears.
Wet-nurse in the womb, who gives first breath to all he has made,
When he drops from the belly on the day of his birth.
And you open his lips to feed him.
You hear the voice of a chick, calling from the shell,
For you to give him breath and raise him to life;
You fashion his parts, you bring him to fullness;
And in praise of his fullness, he shatters the egg;
Comes forth on his own two feet.
How many are your works, your mysteries,
O Sole God, O Alone!
You sculpt the earth as you please - you, only you;
All people, all beasts of the field,
Whatever has feet to tread the earth.
Whatever has wings to grace the air.
From the distant lands of Canaan and Kush
to Egypt, you allot each man his place:
His needs, his daily bread.
His years, numbered.
You portion their tongues, in speech and in letter,6
And skins to mark them out,
O you, who established the nations.
You draw up a Nile from the Underworld,
To nourish your subjects as you wish -
Since you, O lord, have made them for your pleasure,
And by pleasure you exhaust Yourself.
Pour yourself out for them, O Disk of Noon, O Invincible,
And give life to the wastelands.
You set a Nile in the Heavens to fall for them,
To crash on the mountains like the waves of the Deep,
To water their fields and their cities.
O King of Eternity, O best of planners* -
A Nile in the Heavens for the foreigners, for the flocks in distant pastures,
And a Nile surging from the Underworld for dearest Egypt.
Your rays nurse every field;
Your life overflows itself,
And by you they live and endure.
By the seasons you temper the whole of Creation;
Winter is a reprieve,
But they will taste you in the heat of summer.7
Glowing in a distant Heaven,
From which to watch the world;
O Risen body of the Sun Disk,
Radiantly alive - now departing, now approaching from afar!
You carve infinity from your body, O Lonely One:
The cities, the towns, fields, the river highways.
There you are, there, at the turn of every eye,
O Disk of Noon, O Lord in whom
All lives and moves and has its being.
But One alone has come from you - Ah, you are in my heart! -
There is none who knows you but your son,
NEFERKHEPERURE, SOLE ONE OF RA,
Who knows your will, who has seen your strength.
You stretch out your arm to fashion the world -
It lives by your rising,
And goes to perish when you rest.
Your body is Life itself, all Life is yours, O Mighty Life.
You have given us eyes to behold your majesty
Until your setting, when all things cease as you collapse unto the West -
Come back, arise! Tarry a little for the sake of the King -
For every hour, every movement, since the foundation of the earth,
Anticipates this son who has come forth from your body:
The Double Crowned King who dwells in Ma’at, Lord of the Two Lands,
NEFERKHEPERURE, SOLE ONE OF RA,
Son of Ra who dwells in Ma’at,
AKHENATEN,
And the King’s wife, his Great Love, his Lady of the Two Lands,
NEFERNEFERUATEN NEFERTITI,
Eternally young, eternally alive.
Postface
Much ink has been split over whether the Atenist reformation is best described as monotheistic, henotheistic, monolatrous, or various other near synonyms, all of which, in this author's opinion, fail to grasp the matter at hand.
The Atenist revolution is of interest to us precisely because it is not theistic at all - it is an attempt at the scientific reduction of all religion and myth to the basic principle of energy. To refer to Akhenaten’s ‘Aten’ as a god, in the same sense we might refer to Ra or Osiris, is a misnomer. True, there still existed, in Akhenaten’s day, a lingering cult of a sun-god of the same name - but by the 18th Dynasty, the cult of Aten had been long since been overshadowed by that of Ra. Its revival, if indeed this was all Akhenaten had intended, might strike us as no more than an affected archaicism, well suited to a period in Egyptian history, following the military conquests of the Thudmosids, of relative stasis. In common parlance, aten had lost some of its status as a proper noun and come to refer, in an entirely secular sense, simply to the physical body of the sun - it is with this in mind that the Atenist movement is to be understood.
The revelation given to Akhenaten is no more and no less than this; from the observation that the sun, this fire which burns but does not consume, appears to be the sole natural phenomenon which releases energy without depleting or taking in, it stands as the only rational candidate for the ‘prime mover’ of the Universe.
Dr. Jan Assmann, to whom I owe a great deal, explains Akhenaten as upholding the sun as the author of light and, by its orbit, time - two distinct forces responsible for sustaining Creation"; I slightly disagree with him on this matter. For one, the word used in Egyptian for ‘rays’ literally means ‘arrows’ - of course, in many contexts it does clearly refer to rays of light, but elsewhere in the Hymn, it appears to indicate the transfer of energy in a much broader sense (eg. ‘Your rays nurse every field,’ immediately preceded by a celebration of the Nile, appears to refer to the Aten bestowing water, not sunlight.) Secondly, in the Atenist body of literature, ‘time’ is considered as nothing but the effect of energy spent; it is measured in the budding of plants, the passage of trading caravans, the gestation of creatures in the womb, and so on. All this is to say, light and time are not distinct principles in the Atenist framework - they are two elements of a singular principle of energy. This may strike the reader as needless pedantry, but I think goes some way toward getting the sense of Akhenaten’s movement. For the Atenist, there exists no aspect of reality that cannot be neatly explained as a result of the interaction of energy, of which the sun is the source, and matter, thus leaving no role in the creation and maintenance of the cosmos for any other force - revealing the supposed gods of Egypt as nothing but the empty repetitions of those Hinterweltlern, the landed priesthood.
What is mostly notably absent about the corpus of Atenist writing is any trace of what had otherwise been the principal concern of the Egyptian religion - the afterlife. A ban on the rites and festivals of Osiris would have functioned for Akhenaten’s subjects essentially as a ban on the proper burial of the beloved departed. ‘Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead,’ so saith the Atenist. He calls idolatrous all that compels man to hide in the half-light of the sanctuary from the brilliant blue of noon - this God of pure metabolism, this sun so internally replete with life that it overflows its bounds and gives life to the world, creating all things for its own self pleasure, perpetually ejaculating, periodically exhausting itself and collapsing lazily under the Western horizon. From now on, divinity is in the world like water is in water. In the words of Jacob Frank, speaking three millennia on:
‘’Everything which is spiritual must be made into flesh, as is ours, so that everyone will see - I will lead out into the open everything which has been in the spirit; so that it might be in flesh, so that it might not be secret.’’
Important to note that ‘horizon’, in modern usage (ie. the point at which the sun is first visible, relative to a given vantage point) does not accurately reflect the Atenist conception of the sun. For Akhenaten, the Sun literally emerges each morning from a specific geographical location, its ‘resting place’, rather than orbiting the Earth (or vice versa); he believed this to be the mountain ravine on the site at which he founded his royal city, Akhetaten. As such, I have used language which suggests this in the first instance, and ‘horizon,’ for readers’ clarity, going forward.
The through-line in this stanza is a military image - i.e. of the Aten as a victorious warrior king who hands over the conquered lands to his son, the prince, perhaps drawn from fact that the lands Akhenaten himself had inherited from his predecessors extended much further than the traditional borders of Egypt, thanks to the military expeditions of the Thutmosids - images of whom, with a foreign army in chains trailing behind the royal chariot, are replete in temples from the period. I have taken certain liberties in my translation to emphasise this.
* ‘Until, / Ah…’ Does not appear in the original, but I have added it in order to emphasise the volta that occurs mid-way through the 2nd Stanza.
AxAxw - I read a pun in this; Ax (spirit) & Axw (sunshine), vs. ‘AxAxw’ (lit. turning green, budding); the hieroglyph shows two birds taking flight amidst reeds; the combined, almost Coleridge-esque image is of a river bank at dawn, with the waterfowl breaking the rushes as they take flight in the morning air - there are obvious difficulties in translating phrases like this, which make full use of Egyptian’s double semantic register (i.e. visual and textual) into English.
Lit. ‘The Great Green’, the Mediterranean, occasionally also the Nile Delta or the Red Sea.
*Budge (1923) translates this as ‘Their tongues are different in speech, their characteristics…' - the passage literally reads as ‘in speech and form’; here, I assume this refers to both the spoken and written versions of a language.
The notion I try to express here, of the power of the Aten expressed in the bitter heat of the desert sun, is drawn from:
‘’A diplomatic letter from the ruler of Assyria states that many emissaries complained Akhenaten made them wait for hours in full sunlight in his unroofed governmental buildings, intended to physically introduce them to his new god, the Sun disk’’ - Akhenaten’s Amarna in New Kingdom Egypt: Relations of Landscape and Ideology, 2016, p. 54
"Energy is eternal delight" and Heisenberg confirmed Blake. Good to read about a religion not based on stuff such as 'salvation', 'redemption' and 'justification', which are merely interesting parts of Wittgenstein's word cloud.